STORY PLACEMENT

 THIS STORY TAKES

 PLACE BETWEEN THE

 BIG FINISH AUDIO
 DRAMAS "THE

 SANDMAN" AND

 "DOCTOR WHO AND THE

 PIRATES."

 

 PRODUCTION CODE

 7C/G

  

 WRITTEN BY

 ROBERT SHEARMAN

 

 DIRECTED BY

 ROBERT SHEARMAN &

 NICHOLAS BRIGGS

 

 WORKING TITLE

 DALEK INVASION

 

 RECOMMENDED 

 PURCHASE

 BIG FINISH CD#40

 (ISBN 1-84435-022-3)

 RELEASED IN JANUARY

 2003.

 

 BLURB

 HURRAH! THE DEADLY

 Daleks are back! Yes,

 those loveable tinpot

 tyrants have another

 plan to invade our

 world. Maybe this

 time because they

 want to drill to the

 Earth’s core. Or

 maybe because they

 just feel like it.

 

 And when those pesky

 pepperpots are in 

 town, there is one

 thing you can be sure

 of. There will be non-

 stop high octane

 mayhem in store. And

 plenty of

 exterminations!

 

 But never fear. The

 Doctor is on hand to

 sort them out.

 Defender of the Earth,

 saviour of us all.

 With his beautiful

 assistant, Evelyn

 Smythe, by his side, he

 will fight once again

 to uphold the beliefs

 of the English Empire.

 All hail the glorious

 English Empire!

 

 PREVIOUS                                                                                  NEXT

 

Jubilee

january 2003

(4 EPISODES)

 

 

                                                       

 

 

“Jubilee” has quite quickly (and justifiably so) become a huge fan favourite amongst Doctor Who devotees, and after his sterling work on this play as well as on “The Holy Terror” and “The Chimes of Midnight”, Rob Shearman is now often praised as the greatest Doctor Who

writer of our time.

 

I did not think Big Finish would ever manage to surpass Marc Platt’s mercurial “Spare Parts”, but with “Jubilee” though, they equal or perhaps even surpass that story. Here Shearman takes the Daleks and the English and puts a whole new twist on the old 'us and them' doctrine.

 

In the Tower of London an alien creature has spent a hundred years being tortured, mocked and parodied. In 1903, the Doctor and Evelyn (apparently) thwarted a Dalek Invasion of Earth and in doing so inadvertently cemented England’s status as a hegemonic power – as the hegemonic power. One hundred years later, in 2003, the English Empire has complete dominion over the planet thanks to stolen technology from the defeated Daleks. And ironically, this “glorious English Empire” has become more and more like the Daleks it defeated back in 1903, Rochester (superbly portrayed by Martin Jarvis) and his “little wife” Miriam ruling tyrannically over the masses. The cast make such good use of the irony in Shearman’s script that Rochester sounds uncannily like Davros when he rants, and the

effect of banning the use of contractions makes the Tower guard sound particularly Dalek-like.

 

The story is also clever in that, almost in spite of themselves, the listeners find their allegiances shifting to the side of the tortured creature in the tower, and even when it is revealed that is a Dalek, thanks to some brilliant writing and a first class vocal performance from Nicholas Briggs, we still sympathise with it. In fact, we want Evelyn to be right about it – we want it to be a good Dalek; to have emotions and to defeat the evil English Empire.

 

However, the plot is perhaps too clever in that the TARDIS is split, materialising in both

1903 and 2003, creating two Doctors, two Evelyns, and two versions of history. Although the situations that this strange anomaly creates allow Shearman to tell his brilliant story, it does confuse throughout and never feels adequately explained.

 

The infamous scenes of the Dalek’s torture are genuinely horrific. For example, the Dalek is boiled inside its casing and the liquid released from the Daleks body is bottled and sold as a delicacy. Moreover, the Dalek is threatened with having its optical nerve sliced, the result being that it would “not be able to do anything but see”, and every second of sight would cause it the most agonising pain. The torture is not limited to the Dalek, though. Another creature spends its time lurking in the tower, scuttling around in his wheelchair. Shearman’s dialogue intentionally misleads the listener into thinking that this could be Davros (Miriam even saying “…you might say he created them [the Daleks]”) but it is actually revealed to

be the Doctor (from the other time frame), his legs amputated as a punishment for repeated escape attempts. Most brutally of all, Rochester slices and dices dwarves to make them fit inside Dalek casings for his own amusement.

 

The warped culture of the English Empire is completely based around the Doctor and the Daleks – the Doctor the tall, good-looking action hero. They build statues of him with bulging muscles, make movies of him blowing up Daleks and sweeping Evelyn ‘Hot Lips’ Smythe of her feet, make his hideous patchwork coat a state secret and then lock their saviour up in

the Tower and cripple him! Miriam’s speech to Evelyn about the Doctor and the Daleks being two sides of the same coin encapsulates the concept of their equal potential for propaganda, either useless without the other. With the population of the English Empire drinking ‘Dalekade’ and watching Dalek movies this story takes the Dalekmania of the sixties and puts a whole new spin on it!

 

The story really sucks the listener in and holds their attention from the word go, however as I touched upon earlier the plot itself is far from being easy to grasp, and at the end there is no real explanation of the temporal paradox that causes the whole ghastly mess. When the 1903-2003 history has been corrected (except for Rochester, and apparently the Doctor and Evelyn), the Doctor ominously states, “it’s still here.” Obviously the effect is to give the impression that the evil (be it Dalek or Human) will never die, but it does not make for a satisfactory ending at all.

 

What is satisfactory, though, is to listen in horror as the Doctor walks unwittingly into the Tower to help the poor, tortured creature, completely unaware that it is his greatest enemy.

 

“DOC-TOR!”

 

What a cliffhanger!

 

Best of all though, after making us sympathise with the Dalek’s suffering throughout the play, Shearman allows the Doctor to make the final cut into its heart (yes, it seems to have one); you can feel Dalek’s very essence break as the Doctor spells out the future of its race to it.

 

“What will you do when you have conquered the universe? Fight each other,

Dalek against Dalek, until there is only one, alone, like you have been…”

 

In a word, magnificent.

 

Copyright © E.G. Wolverson 2006

 

E.G. Wolverson has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

Unless otherwise stated, all images on this site are copyrighted to the BBC and are used solely for promotional purposes.

Doctor Who is copyright © by the BBC. No copyright infringement is intended.